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Saturday, December 10, 2011

This Is How Nerds Do It...

Grocery shopping ya'll. This is how Nerds grocery shop. If you've been following me for any time, you may have figured out I'm a bit of a nerd and maybe a little bit different. Feel free to take a look inside the 3 a.m. version of my brain and have a poke around. Cue the 90's R&B/Pop music, please:

It's the middle of the night and I can't sleep. I'm laying in the dark bored, tired and mentally putting together a grocery list. Somehow, I realize I can make a blog post out of it. Don't ask me. I just live in my brain. I can't actually explain how it works. Trying to explain how I, as a nerd, grocery shop gave birth to the title of the post. At that point, the song became stuck in my head. Yeah, you may be able to tell, falling back asleep wasn't going to happen to me for awhile.

For some people, grocery shopping is a simple "fly by the seat of your pants" kind of event. But not in my head. In my head, there are spread sheets, web pages, grocery lists, and more web pages. And what's in my head, becomes reality.

If you're a voyeur type, just plain curious, or looking for meal inspiration you can click on the image or here.

Once I've got all the needed items listed, I head on over to one of the local grocery store websites and start clicking like mad. Can I tell you how much I love this? I put an item in a search bar, add it to my cart and repeat. Once I've gone through my list in about 20-30 mins, I'm all checked out with a 1 hour delivery window scheduled for the following day. How sweet is that? No driving, no road rage, no parking primo-spot hunt, no wrangling of England's bizarre shopping carts (seriously, they'll give you a whole new level of workout on your core muscles. What's up with that England?), no dodging the old people who can't control those carts, no panic attacks from trying to survive the absolute hordes of people in the store, and no carrying the groceries into the house.

You want to know what I find weirdly satisfying during this process? If, for example, I'm searching for a whole chicken on the grocer's site, I can literally sit there and compare price/per kg from each type of chicken with a quick visual scan of their available items list. It makes me feel just a little bit more in control of how much money I'm willing to spend on whatever quality of food I'm looking for. I hate standing in the cold section of the store trying to compare the different chicken types and looking on each tag for prices/per kg. It just seems to take ages and I never feel confident that I found the best answer. Never mind the reality of being constantly buffeted by people as you try to do it or how difficult it might be to breath when that guy that smells like a toilet wafts by you. (Seriously dude, shower before a store run. Please.) And if I've forgotten or missed something on my list, I have a good window of time to amend my order. Even better, the store keeps track of what I've ordered, how much it's cost and I gain even better control of my finances. For my future online shopping, I can go to my history and just start clicking on regular weekly items. It just about can't get any easier than this. Well, it can. But that's my secret multi-million dollar software idea. (Any investors out there want to contact me? ;) Seriously. Hit me up 'yo!)

And that's how this nerd grocery shops! Hopefully, someday soon I'll be able to up my nerd game and include some uber couponage to this process. I love saving some money.

You know, the first few times it's kind of time consuming and a rough process. The more often you do it, the easier and faster it gets. In the end, it turns out to be a MASSIVE time saver for me. I don't end up making multiple trips to the store during the week. There isn't excess food in the house for everyone to snack on mindlessly so everyone is more aware of what and when they're eating which saves money and resources over all. Plus, if you like watching food shows during the week they can give plenty of inspiration. I grab my laptop and do a quick recipe search during commercials when I see one that's particularly tasty looking. If I manage to hit the jackpot, I'll slap that bad boy on a the menu. Plus, if I'm lucky enough to come across blogs on the internet that have fabulous recipes/ideas (like ::cough cough:: SatsWithMaggy) it's just a matter of a couple of clicks to copy and paste. Fabulous stuff.

Ok, I seriously need to do this. I make spreadsheets for every other aspect of my life, including holiday cards, so why not food? I think would save me a lot of time, money, and food waste. And again, you prove your genius.